You are currently browsing the stories about the “Midtown” neighborhood.
Dear Angela Cardinale: Sorry to write to you months after the fact but I only just read your piece that was e-mailed to the NY Companion Bird Club. Why didn't you tell us that you were interviewing our club for your article? And the details, Angela, did you write from memory or tape-record us? It was brilliant! I had no [...]
My Uncle Ayman is out of Lemon Snapple. I fish through the drink compartment, a deep bin on the far left of the hot dog cart, and settle for a Diet. "Please. Courtney. Take whatever you want." He always says my name like it’s a sentence all its own. He’s selling hot dogs, lukewarm pretzels, iced teas, and sodas on [...]
Morning at a Midtown Manhattan publishing company office. Cubicles house individual workers. Cube walls are six feet high. My coworker, Lilly, is standing in the corner of my cubicle when it happens. In a fit of pique over the latest uncorrected typo, she’s suddenly throwing Kung Fu kicks, whirling, twirling, balletic, her long raven hair whipping around her face. I [...]
Yes, he was wearing sunglasses inside his tinted command car. He did not exit the car; he exuded suspiciousness. I could see that he didn’t have much room in there. He was surrounded by banks of monitors and servers. Half hidden, he waited for me to explain myself. I told him my particulars, held out my camera and asked if [...]
A few seasons back, Perry Ellis (the company) chose Patrick Robinson (the designer) to resurrect its iconic American style . This past September Robinson staged a renegade runway show where the spectators did the walking, parading past lines of models posing and preening in a cacophony of Spring 2004 style in muted pastels, creamy whites and quirky patterns, not a [...]
Illustration by Elisha Cooper I was married and she was married and we probably shouldn't have been doing what we were doing, especially where we were doing it. But there we were, late winter, 2002, at 57th and Broadway, a spot that, at least to an out-of-towner like me, signified something important. I read once that that intersection was the [...]
Our company president paced before us in miniature Ferragamo shoes, her furrowed brow crowned by a platinum beehive. With her short, tyrannical stature she smacked of Kim Jong II preparing to invade Madison Avenue. She had called us junior PR flacks into her office for a rousing speech. "You’re the best of the agency and that’s why we have you [...]
Now Elle stands to demonstrate the Bunny dip— Playboy’s signature manner of serving drinks. She is all cool grace: knees together, a slight roll, the bosom strategically directed away from the customer while the Bunny tail rises. “When I got out of school in 1965,” Elle says, returning to her stool at the bar, “every job I went for: they [...]
The girl arrived late on a Friday afternoon and interrupted what I was doing. She refused to take a number and said she only had to collect her airline ticket and that she didn’t have time to wait. She had to get to the airport, she said. I was busy helping somebody, I explained with overt politeness, and she would [...]
When I was assigned to photograph the bank manager, something inside me gave a decisive nod. The bank manager was someone I could hate. The bank manager was someone I could hunt. Even though he had suffered this horrible experience the day before, I looked at the photographs of him flailing on the ground, attached to what he thought was [...]
In the late 60's, I went to the old Madison Square Garden on 50th St. to see a main-go between two Latin fighters. One a Cuban and one a Puerto Rican. So, the Garden is a tinder box; any spark will ignite it. The main event is very hotly contested, and could go either way. When the decision was announced, [...]
It was 1972 and I was walking along Third Ave. one evening past PJ Clarke's, a bar-hangout for the sports crowd and the media, and a booming voice hails me, "Joe!, Joe! Over here!' I looked over in the direction of the voice and I saw a guy as big as a building in a huge suit standing in Clarke's [...]
My teenage years in the suburbs of Philadelphia were filled with lone trips to the city to cruise South Street and ogle its unsophisticated riff-raff. Later, to help finance my Bachelor’s Degree at NYU, I worked at the counter of an Espresso Bar near Carnegie Hall. The neighborhood got some suprisingly rough traffic. There was the lady who wore a [...]
The name: Stillman's Gym still is magical to old ring veterans--rapidly vanishing--but it's mostly just a revered icon like Jack Johnson or Boyle's Half-Acre that fight purists have read about in an old issue of Ring Magazine or on the internet in vintage columns of Dan Parker and Jimmy Cannon. For me, Stillman's isn't like talking about Benny Leonard or [...]
In a city with an Irish pub on every corner, where are the other kilt-wearing Celts to be found? Since returning from a trip to the Scottish Highlands, I have noticed a distinct lack of Scottish presence in New York, particularly when compared to the Irish. I searched in vain for the Whisky Mac, a mellow drink of equal parts [...]
Day 24. Widespread looting in Baghdad. I had been gearing up for three weeks for the antiwar demonstration in D.C., but as it approached I became uncomfortably aware of several things. First of all, none of my friends were going, in fact, most had not even heard about the demonstration. Secondly, I did not like the prospect of having to [...]
At about quarter to five this past Thursday I got into a cab at 56th and Broadway; my destination was the Port Authority and the Short Line Bus to my home in Orange County. It was a rainy, miserable day and I was damned glad to get the cab. My driver was relievedly Haitian -- one checks these days. As [...]
On Saturday, February 15th, I woke up at my usual time, and as I pattered around the apartment, I glanced out of my window to check the weather. It was bleak, only twenty-five degrees, with blistering winds, and on 47th Street there were at least twenty police vehicles lining the sidewalks. I started to pick up the sounds around me, [...]
One of the sayings where I work is that we see them all. Creaky old dope fiends with nine lives and wrecked veins, skinny young Africans with silky French accents, and lots of distracted crack smokers with rattling lungs. We also see the occasional sweet matronly mami from Puerto Rico or a doe-eyed young innocent from Harlem. But for the [...]
The cold wreaked transformation: bone chilling and serious, the kind that keeps people home, yet here we were, all of us, shivering, waving signs, gleeful. Maybe half a million, and if the media says otherwise don’t believe it. Half a million! Could we really stop a war? At times like this, people change. I saw possible proof by the curb. [...]
Part III. Rough diamonds are mined from volcanic vents in Africa. They're separated into parcels for the London sight-holders who have the stones cut in Antwerp, Israel, or India. The finished products are divvied out to various diamond brokers and then brought over to New York. Over 80% of the diamonds sold in the USA pass through 47th Street, making [...]
When Regina Moss no longer resembled the sincere sandy-haired gentleman on his driver's license, job-hunting threatened to become Grand Guignol. The Taxi-Limousine Commission (the least friendly form of TLC) confiscated his doctored I.D., making destitution natural as sunrise -- not hours away but close enough. Bi-weekly female hormone shots had to be paid for as well as an on-going wardrobe [...]
I arrived in New York during the summer of 2000 from somewhere else. It doesn't matter where because nowhere else is like New York. Like most newcomers I was awed by the spectacle. I stole glances at the sky from the sidewalk while I tried to keep pace with other pedestrians. I walked the streets as a stranger. I thought [...]
Among the stories I have either heard or read about the Villard Houses, my favorite is one about William Faulkner. Between 1949 and 1969 Bennet Cerf's Random House occupied the north wing of the stately brownstone that takes up the entire block between 50th and 51st on Madison Avenue. During those years Faulkner divided his time between Oxford, Mississippi and [...]
In the autumn of 1991 I came to New York to take a fiction writing class. I was 23, fresh out of graduate school, with no savings and little work experience save for two summers clerking in a bookstore in the Maryland suburbs. I wanted to be close to the rarefied air of New York publishing. Inspired by movies like [...]
My first job in Midtown Manhattan was as a clerical assistant in a large law firm on Fifth Avenue. It’s the building of the beast with the illuminated neon red 666 emblazoned across the top of the structure. It wasn’t glamorous work, but I made the best of my surroundings by exploring the neighborhood during my lunch break. My other [...]
Illustrations by Elisha Cooper Some people come to New York for the thrills. Some for romance. My desire starts lower down--well below the knee--in a hidden, private erogenous zone, where I get my kicks. This is the story of my socks life. I was travelling along Broadway in one of those reassuring black Town Cars. My agent was with me. [...]
"American Vogue, please!" screeched the group of blond, stick-figure 16-year olds teetering on platform espadrilles, each one clawing to get a grip on the gleaming steel reception desk in front of them. "Who are you here to see?" said the straight-faced security guy, who was, clearly, over the model thing. From my vantage point behind them , these girls looked [...]
One of the other editors is looking at the Dow Jones or the stock market or something and whistling. “Wow!” He shakes his head. “You wouldn’t even believe how bad it is!” He sounds kind of merry. The staff reporter is reading aloud from a posting on a job search web page from a woman, a college graduate and a [...]
I was sitting in a bathroom stall in late June on the third or fourth floor of The New York Public Library, back past the Charles Addams drawings, and I began to think about my old schoolmate Derrick Foster. I ran into Derrick about 10 years ago, long after I had known him in grammar school, and we chatted about [...]
Le Parker Meridien on West 57th is not the type of hotel where my parents took my siblings and me when we weren't camping or staying with relatives. It wasn't in my budget during the winter of 2000 either. At the time I felt self-conscious of each cold step taken across the hard marble floors. I looked furtively at my [...]
The doorman doesn't ask , but he knows where we are going. The guy at the front desk seems wise to what floor two female twentysomethings are headed for. The buildings Super, who shares our elevator, is all too aware of why we pushed button #12 and me and my gal pal snicker in the awkward silence. The Super gets [...]
Through four years of college Louise Holmes was always in my dreams and always out of my reach. So you might imagine the huge surge of adrenaline when one Friday afternoon, two years after graduation, I obeyed the DON'T WALK sign at 53nd and Broadway, looked to my left and discovered she was standing next to me, little changed. "Hi," [...]
Friday, June 22, 1956…one day out of Rice High School and just seventeen years old … the first day in what my yearbook identified as my career - advertising. And what more appropriate place to start? At the bottom of the (at-the-time), worlds' biggest advertising agency, the mailroom of the J. Walter Thompson Company. JWT had billings of over $370 [...]
The cellar of the Chrysler Building is midtown's one great monument to the American filling station. It offers (for free) the same perfume of motor oil, the same lulling throb of distant engines, the not unpleasant heat, the mesmerizing hiss of compressed air. And it is always noontime in the Chrysler Building cellar, the same endless noontime with everything suspended [...]
I was temping. My ‘agent’, as I liked to think of him, was overweight and short, with a firm handshake and a friendly manner. He called me “Bud” a lot. Although he was very enthusiastic every time we spoke on the phone, he seemed incapable of placing me in a job that paid more than ten dollars an hour. I’m [...]
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